Focusing on the sensors, she could try to ignore the latest dustup at the far end of the compartment. Eyeball and the Autocrat made an odd pair—one could not even imagine using the word couple—to put it mildly. The absolute symbol of authority, and the absolute rebel. They shouldn’t have been in the same compartment together, even with a referee. Sondra briefly considered shooing the Autocrat out and letting Eyeball and herself get on with it—but no. The Autocrat had every right to see the last act of what he had helped to set in motion.
Besides, being in a black mood did not seem to have much effect on Eyeball’s competence or capacity for work. If anything, she seemed to perform better when she was good and angry.
Sondra and Eyeball were going to have to manage one of the most delicate phases of the whole operation. Their timing was going to have to be superb.
There. Good. The ring had taken the signal. The long-dormant ring began to awaken. Maybe they would pull this off after all. Of course, up here, they had the easy job.
Sondra knew enough of the Charonian language now that she had no real doubts that they could control this one ring. The team heading down to the surface of Solitude had the tough job.
After all—how the hell did you wake up a planet?
Twelve hours later, the Hijacker II lit her engines for the final braking maneuver. The lander slowed, came to a halt, a nice, even hover. The pilot eased the craft to port and a bit forward in search of flatter terrain, and then gently moved back the throttle. A smooth, perfect landing, the first landing by any human spacecraft on a planet outside the Solar System—but everyone was too busy sealing their suits and getting to work to worry about history. Almost before the engines were cut, the airlock was open, and the first team members were on the surface, the first steps onto the new world going quite unrecorded.
But then, if this didn’t work, who the hell was going to be around to write the histories in the first place?
Three days. They had three days before the Adversary arrived.
All Wally Sturgis knew for sure was that he was one of the last ones down to the surface. The whole situation seemed quite unreal to him. It was, after all, the sort of thing he did in simulations, not in real life. If it had all been hypothetical, if he were controlling a computer model of a landing on Solitude and the rest of the plan, then he could have believed it was real.
This, though. Strange. Very strange.
Wally followed the last of the crew to the airlock and cycled through with Larry and Sianna. The inner doors of the lock shut, the air was pumped out, and the hatch opened out onto Solitude.
“So this used to be the Moon?” Larry asked. “Or like the Moon?”
Sianna nodded. “We ran the simulations of how a world like this would come to be. This is what Earth’s Moon would have become, if the Charonians had succeeded in taking the Solar System apart and building it into a Multisystem. The Lunar Wheel would have grown up and out from a single band deep under the surface, reaching out in all directions, building itself up into a control center, into the brains of the operation, into—this.”
They climbed down the exterior ladder, stepped away from the lander, and looked around. They were near Solitude’s north pole, and the Hijacker II was sitting on one of the few pieces of real estate in the area that was still dirt and rock, one of the few areas that the Charonians had not turned into… something else.
Once Solitude had been like any of the cratered, airless worlds that Nature seemed so fond of creating. It was about the same size and mass as the Moon, just a trifle larger and denser.
All around the lander, the surface was covered with low, misshapen domes, antennae, boxy metallic shapes, odd mushroom-shaped protuberances black as obsidian, and other forms even harder to identify or describe. No, strike that. The surface was not covered with the strange devices—the surface was made of them, their bases all merging one into the other, or else linked together by a brownish material that was dried up and flaking.
Larry knelt down and peeled a bit of the brown stuff up. “Wheel-skin,” he said. “Same stuff the Lunar Wheel is made out of.”
The skin did not cover everything. Some spots were formed out of fused soil and bits of slumped-over rock. Small, half-melted craters were still discernible in spots. Wally crouched down to get a look at the brown skin of the—the machine, if you could call it that. He was facing a low, five-sided obelisk, and reached out a hand to touch it. What the hell was it, and what was it for?
Wally looked up at the sky and drew in his breath. The Shattered Sphere swallowed up half the sky, a black-red wound that reached from horizon to horizon, its smashed, ruined face broken and terrifying. A huge crack staggered across its surface from behind the horizon. Giant craters marred its surface. That thing was big enough that Earth’s old orbit could fit comfortably inside. And they were trying to take it over, to use for their own purposes.
Keep your head down, Wally told himself. Look at the surface, not at the sky.
Wally put his back to the Sphere—and spotted a red claw, just peeking out from behind a stand of the black mushroom-shapes. Was it still alive, somehow? His stomach tightened just a bit, and he stood up, went around the side of the mushrooms, and took a look.
A small mobile Charonian, about a half meter long, beetle-shaped and fire-engine red, flipped over on its back, ten legs in the air, its manipulator claws dangling uselessly. It was, to Wally’s relief, very clearly dead. A repairman? Larry and Sianna followed him over to take a look.
“Looks like a relative of the scorps we got in the Solar System,” Larry said.
Sianna turned and looked farther out into the odd field of machinery. “They’re all over the place,” she said. Wally looked around, and immediately started spotting more of the repair bugs, all of them bright colored, and all of them dead, scattered all over the surface. Color-coded repair bugs?
“Hey, over here,” Larry said. Wally and Sianna walked to where he was standing. A repair bug seemed to have succumbed with its front end dangling over the edge of some sort of hole. Wally pulled the handlight from his suit and pointed it down the hole. It was a long vertical shaft about twenty-five centimeters across. Far too narrow for a human to go down, but just the right size for the shocking-pink beetle that had keeled over at its entrance. The shaft had ladder rungs set into one side of it. His light was not powerful enough to reach the bottom.
“Down below,” Larry said, “this has got to be just like the Lunar Wheel and the Moon, only much further along in its development. The Wheel here has built clear up to the surface, and built all this.”
Wally looked around again, studying the shapes of the objects that covered the surface. What was all this stuff for? And then it came to him. “So,” he asked, “is this an antenna farm?”
“I’d say so,” Sianna replied. “At least some of these things look like detectors and signaling systems. The Wheel down below would pipe its commands up to the surface here, to other centers elsewhere in the system.”
“But how the hell are we going to tap into it all?” Wally asked. He started walking again, looking for something. What, he did not know.
Three days, he told himself again. How the hell could that possibly be enough time? Never mind that. Concentrate. Solve the puzzle. Analyze. The dish shapes were clearly some sort of radio-band antennas, and the spike-shapes probably omni-directional antennas. But not everything Charonian had a clearly functional shape. He couldn’t guess what everything was just by looking at it. That cable, there for example, running between two of the pentagonal obelisks. It could be anything.